Jon Stewart And The Media: Let's Not All Get Along

Jon Stewart's plot to "Restore Sanity" included a call for the
death of the lefty vs. righty shoutfest on cable news. Some in
the media
felt he blamed the media too much. He didn't. He just blamed
the wrong half.

Stewart's main media target at his (enormously successful and
ridiculously crowded) rally last weekend were the shouting heads:
Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, that Ed guy on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann.
(It was clear his staff had taken pains to include roughly equal
numbers of liberals and

conservatives in the video montages). This is nothing new. The
false Right vs. Left oppositional dynamic of cable news has been
a favorite target of Stewart's since before he ripped Tucker
Carlson and Paul Begala a new asshole,
live on Crossfire.

He's right about this, as far as it goes. The cable news
industry's tendency to package everything in neat Left vs. Right
oppositional dynamic does erode our nation's political
dialogue. And alarmist TV news reporting on everything from local
crime to product recalls does make old people
unnecessarily afraid of the world.

But cheap media hype is nothing new. The real media dynamic that
undermines American democracy is not ginned-up ideological
confrontation; it's agreement. The mushy middle. The
inherent tendency of the political media to choose its position
by splitting the difference between the (perceived) positions of
the Left and the Right. Mistaking conventional wisdom for actual
wisdom.

The media does not have the power to convince liberals or
conservatives that their position is incorrect. The media does
have the power to do this: draw a box, and say, "This box
represents the boundaries of acceptable opinions." The boundaries
of this box are arrived at by sampling a small range of
politically acceptable pundits—say, from Arianna Huffington to
Charles Krauthammer—and declaring them to represent the absolute
extremes of rationality. Any opinions that fall outside of this
box are dismissed as lunacy, and may be freely ignored.

For a reporter, or a columnist, or an "analyst," it never pays to
find yourself outside of this box. It does pay to place yourself
in the very center of this box, with comfortable cushions on each
side. No chance of falling out! The currency of political media
is "credibility," as defined by other members of the media. To
position oneself so that an equal number of talking heads are on
your left and on your right on a given issue is taken as a sign
of reason. To receive an equal amount of hate mail from Democrats
and Republicans is taken as proof of impartiality. To decry
"partisanship" is taken as a sign of level-headedness. To
obsequiously compliment politicians and commentators with
diametrically opposite viewpoints is taken as a sign of a nimble
mind.

Members of the establishment media know each other. They're
friends. They're neighbors. They go to the same parties. They
date and sleep around with each other. They sit in green rooms
together, making small talk as they wait to appear on each
other's television shows. In this environment, sticking out just
doesn't pay. Political disagreements must stay within acceptable
bounds. It's not a question of ideology—it's a question of not
wanting to be rude, to upset and offend and argue with these
people who are your peers. It's just not worth it. It doesn't pay
socially, or career-wise. The establishment Washington political
media, taken as a group, will never allow itself to stray into
free thought. It has no incentive to do so.

F**k bipartisanship. Politics is about different ideas, and many
of them are irreconcilable. You have to choose one or the other.
Jon Stewart is right to call for civility, but he should
recognize that the real enemy is agreement, rather than
disagreement. Social niceties blunt honesty, which renders our
public dialogue coded and often worthless. Democracy thrives on
the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process of open and uninhibited
discussion and, yes, argument. We do not need gratuitous
argument, for the sake of attention-seeking; but we do need an
atmosphere in which those with voices and a platform feel
compelled to speak and think and analyze honestly, without giving
a second thought
to the favor economy. And we don't have that.

David Carr wrote today that Stewart spent too much time
targeting the media, using it as a scapegoat while failing to
discuss larger political issues. Since David Carr is the media
writer for the New York Times, he will never, ever be
able to get away with calling for more sympathy for the media,
without taking a tremendous amount of shit for it. But at least
he gave it a shot! Better to say what you think and wade through
the hate afterwards than to sit in that green room before Howard
Kurtz's CNN show with a sh**-eating grin on your face, making
small talk with some media a**hole you can't stand, just trying
to get along.